Doing a PhD during a pandemic has annihilated my weekly habit of blogging. It’s been a bit tough to maintain space in my schedule and brain for photography, let alone writing about photography!

For the next wee while I’ll post a few photo updates of what I’ve been up to. I have a ridiculous backlog of images from the last year and a bit that I haven’t even really looked at. I’ll get around to them eventually (maybe post thesis hand-in at the end of August). There won’t be many words, but there will be plenty of birds. Stay tuned ~

After a pretty gruelling field trip in December, I took this photo. I’d been working all night and through most of the day, catching sleep in the quiet dawn hours for nearly two weeks, with less to show for it than I’d have liked. Seabird science is hard, especially when the seabirds don’t cooperate. At dawn on our final day, we packed up and made the trip down the hill to board our boat as a fiery sunrise blazed. We weren’t going home, though. We were going out to look for more seabirds.

Fatigue makes my normally manageable seasickness worse – a lot worse. The sea wasn’t rough, with long low swells rolling us gently, but I was wretched. Exhausted, nauseated, hungry, grimy after an all-nighter in the bush. I sipped peppermint tea and prepped my camera gear in stages, ducking from the cabin out on deck when breakfast ejection felt imminent. The thing about my brain, though, is that it can near-magically turn the sea-sickness off if I distract it enough. And storm petrels are pretty distracting.

Our only visitors were these guys – takahikare-moana, White-faced storm petrels, and takoketai, Black petrels. It wasn’t a successful ‘seabirding’ trip. I’m more of a photographer than a birder though, and this photo alone made it a successful trip for me. Once we were done, I collapsed face-down on the bench in the cabin and slept the entire way back to Whangārei.